Correct Positioning

We recently talked about niche brands and how Firefly and SilkAir haven’t positioned themselves to they needed time to establish trust and long term be anything other than niche players. And they aren’t growth. Becoming a niche brand can be a result of delivering a ‘job to be done’ which is unique or a specific marketing strategy, or it can happen by superior. In contrast, another niche player, Bangkok accident. Sadly, many brands become niche players Airways, called itself ‘’s Boutique Airline’. This by accident. clearly positioned the carrier as providing unique, specialist services which were not low cost. Like a For example, I don’t have any knowledge of actual ‘boutique hotel’. business performance, but I would argue that AirAsia had a big vision of ‘Now everyone can has managed to achieve sometimes fly’ which underpinned its reason for being and obscenely high fares by gaining monopolistic provided a broad platform for long term growth. positions on various routes, but delivering excellent Whereas Firefly was simply positioned as an airline inflight full service even on the shortest haul flights. that flew to short haul destinations that MH didn’t want to fly to. And SilkAir was based on the same It’s brand proposition is probably something like premise for Airlines. this: “We may charge you a fortune to fly with us, but at least we give you good food and drink served I suspect that ever since they were launched, both by charming, smiling inflight staff….and we get you Firefly and SilkAir have searched for a viable market to a place that is otherwise very hard to get to”. So positioning. Both are niche players searching for Bangkok Airways deliberately positioned itself as a their niche! niche player, and then carved out a very profitable niche that it dominated. Low cost carriers? Not really. Flying to unique destinations? Maybe some. Unique inflight services or seating? No. Better online booking and superior customer Do you have a niche brand? Did you position it as niche service? No. brand deliberately, or did it happen by default?

So why would I fly Firefly or SilkAir rather than If so, how are you going to adjust your vision and proposition AirAsia or Tiger with their clear broad based to break out of the limitations the brand has created for marketing propositions of low cost, no frills, and itself? high frequency schedules?